January 1895. On a freezing morning in the heart of Paris, an army officer, George Picquart, witnessed a convicted spy, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, being publicly humiliated in front of twenty thousand spectators baying “Death to the Jews!”

The officer is rewarded with promotion: Picquart is made the French army’s youngest colonel and put in command of “the Statistical Section” – the shadowy intelligence unit that tracked down Dreyfus.

The spy, meanwhile, is given a punishment of medieval cruelty: shipped off to a lifetime of solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, Dreyfus is forbidden to speak to anyone, even his guards, and his case seems closed for ever.

But gradually Picquart comes to believe there is something rotten at the heart of the Statistical Section. When he discovers another German spy operating on French soil, his superiors are oddly reluctant to pursue it. Despite official warnings, Picquart persists, and soon the officer and the spy are in the same predicament…

Narrated by Picquart, An Officer and a Spy is a compelling recreation of a scandal that became the most famous miscarriage of justice in history. Compelling, too, are the echoes for our modern world: an intelligence agency gone rogue, justice corrupted in the name of national security, a newspaper witch-hunt of a persecuted minority, and the age-old instinct of those in power to cover up their crimes.

Robert Harris is the author of eight bestselling novels: Fatherland, Enigma, Archangel, Pompeii, Imperium, The Ghost, Lustrum and The Fear Index. Several of his books have been filmed, most recently The Ghost, which was directed by Roman Polanski. His work has been translated into thirty-seven languages. He lived in the village of Kintbury, West Berkshire, with his wife Gill Hornby and a fluctuating number of children.